[This book review is scheduled to be published in the Spring 2009 issue of The
Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, pp. 139-142.]

Book Review

Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement

Justin Raimondo

ISI Books, 2008

Educated
Americans and others interested in the American ideological debates of the past
century would do well to be familiar with such names as Garet Garrett, John T.
Flynn, Robert McCormick, Rose Wilder Lane,
Isabel Patterson, Leonard Read and Ayn Rand.Perhaps the principal merit of this book is that it gives a good
introduction to each of them and their writings.They were among the main figures within the
Old Right of the middle third of the twentieth century, which championed a
near-anarchist laissez-faire
philosophy and an insistence that America “mind its own business” in world
affairs.

Justin
Raimondo is well suited to write such a book.His own “libertarian” orientation is apparent from his having written a
biography of economist Murray Rothbard, a leading American personality in the AustrianSchool of Economics after World War
II and in the libertarian movement.Presently, Raimondo is the editorial director for “Antiwar.com” and a
fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute.

Although
mostly Raimondo is very favorable to the people just listed, an interesting and
instructive part of the book comes with his debunking of one of them—Ayn
Rand.This is something of a brave
undertaking, because even in death Rand, an overpowering
personality, is a towering figure of ego and didactic ideology.One can conjure up in his imagination the fearsome
prospect of her reaching up from the grave to grab Raimondo by the scruff of
the neck.

The
debunking comes in large part from his revealing the extent to which Rand
semi-plagiarized from the work of Garet Garrett in her two most famous novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (which, no matter, are two of the “must reads” for
anyone interested in political and social philosophy, even someone who has no
proclivity toward becoming one of Rand’s disciples).Readers of Atlas Shrugged know how central the question “Who is John Galt?” is
to the story,and will be astonished to
learn that Garrett’s 1922 novel The
Driver had a character named Henry M. Galt who took “over the bankrupt
Great Midwestern Railroad and turn[ed] it into a mighty empire.”Raimondo says that “like Atlas Shrugged, The Driver is a paean to the entrepreneur as
creator.”He points out that “a
stylistic device used throughout Atlas
Shrugged also occurs in The Driver…
[Like John Galt], Henry M. Galt is introduced as a man of mystery, whose secret
gradually unfolds.”For Garrett, this
gave rise to the question “Who is Henry M. Galt?”

We will
leave it to a reader to peruse Raimondo’s book to see all of the points of
similarity he mentions.But we should
take time here to notice that Rand seems also to have
carried over some key imagery from The
Driver into her The Fountainhead.Raimondo speaks of “the scene in The Fountainhead where Dominique [the
main female character] throws the priceless statue of a Greek god down an air
shaft,” and points out that “in The
Driver, Vera Galt does the same thing to a costly African sculpture for
similarly perverse reasons.”Raimondo
prudently shies clear of calling all of this “plagiarism,” but readers can draw
their own conclusions about Rand’s originality.Such a cloud on her creativity is all the
more distressing because she put her philosophy forward as the epitome of pure
reason, and was powerful in her denunciation of “second-handers.”

A second
ground for debunking Rand is pressed vehemently by
Raimondo when he criticizes her and her followers’ claim that her philosophy
was “something entirely new under the sun,” with no philosophical precursors or
intellectual inheritance other than that of Aristotle.Raimondo calls this “a confession of ignorance
so abysmal that it could only be excusable in the very young.”He sees important precursors in Nietzsche,
Mencken, Nock, Rose Wilder Lane,
Chodorov—“and, indeed, in the entire tradition of nineteenth-century classical
liberalism.”One of the precursors, no
doubt, was Garrett, from whom she borrowed so much.The writer of this review has long seen other
influences as central to Rand’s thinking: Ludwig von Mises, for his extended
exploration of market economics and limited government; Friedrich Nietzsche,
for his exaltation of “the superman” (which shows up in Rand’s super-heroic
individuals); and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the nineteenth century Russian
nihilist whose morality painted everything stridently into pure black and pure
white.(The tie to Chernyshevsky isn’t
based on direct evidence, but is rather inferable from Rand’s
Russian childhood and the remarkable similarity in Savonarola-like moral
stridency.)

Reclaiming the American Right isn’t
primarily about debunking, since he is mainly concerned about resurrecting
several long-forgotten giants and their philosophy.Just the same, his dissection of
“neo-conservatism” is worth the price of the book.He traces the messianic, world-saving
“American hegemony” outlook of neo-conservatism back to the Red Decade of the
1930s and to several anti-Stalinist New York
intellectuals.Over the course of time,
the ideology of “democracy” came to occupy the role that Marxism had once
filled in their lives.One senses
correctly that an important goal of Raimondo’s book is to draw a clear line in
the sand, clarifying the difference between the long-standing “mind our own
business” premise of the American right and what he sees asthe more recent post-Cold War usurpers of
American conservatism who hope to universalize social democratic policy through
American power.

This is an
easy-enough distinction to make, but Raimondo runs into some difficulty when he
goes further and broaches a subject integral to American conservatism of the non-neo variety.This is whether the anti-Communism that
dominated the American Right during the Cold War was itself (a) a form of
“messianic interventionism” or was rather (b) a necessary, decades-long
exception to the non-interventionist philosophy—an exception seen to have been
made necessary by the worldwide threat posed by an expansionist totalitarian
ideology.Raimondo brings to the fore a
from-the-Right criticism of anti-Communism that was seldom heard among American
conservatives during the Cold War, and quite apparently sides with that
criticism.He speaks of such a thing as
“the hysteria over containing and/or rolling back the Communists,” even though
at one point he acknowledges that “the Right’s anticommunist crusade [was seen
as] a temporary expedient.”

His
hostility toward Cold War anti-Communism is, it would seem, rather unfortunate
in light of his desire to invite Americans to “reclaim” the tradition of
non-intervention in foreign affairs.Many of the very people he hopes to bring together as philosophical
allies don’t have any trouble seeing the distinction between fighting
totalitarian expansion and a policy designed to make the United
States the social worker and policeman of
the world after that threat has been defeated.One suspects that it is Raimondo’s seeking for ideological purity—for a
“consistent” holding to non-interventionist principle regardless of world
circumstances—that impels him to offend such readers.

A glaring
omission in Raimondo’s understanding of the American Right, at least as would
appear from this book, comes by way of his foreshortened perspective.He says that the Old Right emerged during the
New Deal years of the 1930s.This drops
the entire context of America’s
ethos of classical liberalism
throughout American history up to that time.It is as though a concern for limited government, for a market economy,
and for staying out of foreign entanglements was born out of the ear of Zeus
after a century and a half of the United States’
existence as an independent country.There is an occasional glimpse at that past that would tend to indicate
that he knows better (such as the fleeting reference to nineteenth century
classical liberalism mentioned above).

For the
history of America’s long-standing non-interventionist foreign policy, which in
the main continued until it was shattered by the adventures of 1898, Raimondo
would do well to read Patrick Buchanan’s A
Republic, Not an Empire.(It is
likely that he has read it, but oddly hasn’t incorporated it into his
thinking.)Buchanan wrote a Foreword to
the 2008 republication of Raimondo’s book, the bulk of which was first
published in 1993, but graciously refrained from making a point out of this.

Even while
focusing on the 1930s, Raimondo never mentions the anti-New Deal majority on
the U.S. Supreme Court.You would think
that such names as Sutherland, Van Devanter, McReynolds and Butler,
the four Justices of the Court who stood out most consistently against the Roosevelt
program, would be prominent in his pantheon of heroes.

All this notwithstanding,
the book has considerable merit for its educational value, introducing readers
to several major personalities in the libertarian, non-interventionist
tradition.It seems strange, though,
that Raimondo’s 1993 claim of a resurgence of the Old Right would be
republished without some hint of embarrassment in 2008, a year when the
American people were absorbed in politics from beginning to end but without a
single major presidential contender, even among the Republican candidates,
coming anywhere close to carrying that banner.(We don’t mean to ignore former congressman Ron Paul, who conducted a
valiant campaign but could hardly be considered to have been a major
contender.)